I felt pretty pleased with myself.271.

Because, although I did not feel calm and civilized, as God is my witness, I was going to do a damn good job at acting it.

However, he didn't seem to find it as gently amusing as I managed to pretend I did.

He gave me a wintry look.

More undertakerish vibes.

The miserable fucker.

Since I was prepared to try to be nice and civil about all this, surely, surely surely, he could too. After all, what had he got to lose?

Maybe he had prepared a beautiful speech about how I would get over him, how he wasn't good enough for me, how we were never really suited, how I was better off without him. Maybe he was disappointed that he wasn't going to get to say it.

He'd probably stood in front of the mirror in his bedroom at the hotel and practiced flinging his arms around me in a beseeching manner while he told me in a voice choked with emotion that, although he still loved me, he was no longer in love in love with me. with me.

We stood in the hall for a few seconds, James looking as if his entire family had just been wiped out in a machete attack. I'm sure I didn't look much better. The tension was terrible.

"Come on into the dining room," I told him, taking charge. Otherwise we could have stood there all day, white-faced, miserable and paralyzed by nerves. "We won't be disturbed there and we can have the table in case we need to spread out documents or whatever."

He nodded grimly and walked down the hall in front of me.

How dare he! What was he looking so bloody uptight about? Surely I was the one who should be afforded that right?

Kate was waiting in the dining room.

She lay in her crib and looked beautiful.

I picked her up and stood holding her, her face against mine.

"This is Kate," I said simply.

He stared at the two of us, opening and closing his mouth.

He looked a bit like a goldfish. A pale, serious goldfish.272.

"She...she's gotten so big, she's grown so much," he finally managed.

"Babies do." I nodded at him sagely.

The subtext being, of course, "If you had stuck around, you bastard, you'd have been there for when she was doing that growing." But I didn't say it.

I didn't need to.

He knew it.

It was written all over his sheepish, shamed face.

"And she's called Kate?" he asked.

The surge of anger was so intense that I thought I would surely kill him.

He hadn't even found out her name, and there were plenty of people he could have asked.

"After Kate Bush?" he asked. Referring to a singer whom, while I certainly liked her, I wouldn't have ever considered calling my firstborn child after.

"Yes," I managed bitterly. "After Kate Bush."

I wasn't going to bother giving him the real reason. What the hell did he care?

"Hey!" he said, the idea obviously just having occured to him. "Can I hold her?" In different circumstances he could have been described as speaking with enthusiasm.

My anger and bitterness had obviously gone right over his neatly combed head.

I wanted wanted to shout at him, "Of course you can hold her, she's waited two months for you to hold her. You're her bloody to shout at him, "Of course you can hold her, she's waited two months for you to hold her. You're her bloody father father!" But I managed not to.

I felt like a traitor, like a third-world mother who is forced by economic circumstances to sell her child to the rich gringo. But I passed her from my arms to his.

And the look on his face.

It was as if he had suddenly become mentally retarded.

All smiles and shining eyes and reverential expression.

Of course he held her all wrong.

Crossways, instead of lengthways.

Horizontal, instead of vertical.

People who know nothing about babies hold them like that.

I know because I did it for the first day or so of Kate's life 273 until one of the other mothers, who was sick of hearing Kate roaring, wearily set me right. ("Up, not across!") But you wouldn't catch me being sympathetic to James for making the same mistake.

Kate started to cry.

Well, of course the poor child did! Being held like a rolled-up carpet by a strange man. Wouldn't you cry? James looked frightened.

"What's wrong with her?" he asked. "How do I make her stop?" The reverential expression disappeared and was replaced by naked fear.

I had known all that mister-nice-guy stuff was too good to be true.

"Here," he said, thrusting her at me. He looked at both of us with an expression of distaste. There was obviously no room for crying women in James's world.

He hadn't always been like that, you know.

Well, he'd married me. And I wasn't famous for blinking back the tears.

Better out than in was always my motto. But looking at him now, at his fastidious expression, I marveled-and it wasn't for the first time-at what a bastard he had become.

"Oh golly." I smiled acidly. "She doesn't seem to like you."

I laughed as if it was a joke and took her back from James's yielding arms.

He couldn't get rid of her fast enough. I cooed and shushed her. She stopped crying. For a moment I felt bitter satisfaction that Kate had sided with me against him.

And then I felt sad and ashamed. James was Kate's father. I should do everything in my power to make them like each other.

I'd find another man to love. But Kate had only the one father. "Sorry."

I smiled apologetically at him. "It's just that you're new to her. Give her a chance. She's scared."

"You're right. It'll probably just take a bit of time," he said, cheering up a bit.

"That's all," I reassured him. But at the same time thinking, horror-struck, when exactly does he propose spending this alleged "bit of time" with her?274.

If he had come to Dublin to try to take Kate back to London, then he had to die. It was really quite simple.

He hadn't done the doting father bit up until now, so what did he want?

"Coffee."

"What?" I asked him sharply.

"Is there any chance of a cup of coffee?" he asked.

He was looking at me as if I was a bit peculiar.

How many times had he asked me before I heard?

"Sure," I told him.

I put Kate back in her crib and went into the kitchen to make him his coffee. I should have offered before. But in all the excitement it never crossed my mind. It was a bit of a relief to get into the kitchen. I sighed long and deep and hard when I closed the door behind me.

My hands shook so much I could hardly fill the kettle. Being with him was so hard. Having to pretend that I was fine was exhausting. And constantly keeping a lid on murderous anger was a demanding business-but I had to do it. I was going to salvage as much as I could for Kate out of this.

I brought the coffee back into the dining room.

And, no, I didn't offer cookies.

I'm sorry, but I just wasn't a big enough person.

He was leaning over the crib, attempting to talk to Kate.

He was having some kind of muttered, uptight discussion with her.

As if she were a business colleague and not a two-month-old baby.

He was not behaving the way nice, normal, warm people do in the presence of young babies. You know, as if they've left their brains out, overnight, in the rain. All singsong noises and doting rhetorical questions.

Asking stupid things like "Who's the most beautiful girl in the whole world?" And the correct answer not, as you might expect, Cindy Crawford, but in fact Kate Webster.

Instead he sounded as if he was discussing tax reforms with her.

But he didn't seem to notice anything amiss.

I put the coffee down on the dining room table and the 275 moment the china touched the mahogany I realized that I had automatically made James's coffee the way that James liked it.

I was furious!

Couldn't I even pretend pretend to have forgotten? to have forgotten?

Couldn't I have given him a milk and two sugars instead of a black, no sugar and half cold water?

And then, when he gagged on it, nursing his burned and oversugared mouth, couldn't I have airily said something like "Oh sorry, I forgot, you're you're the one who doesn't like sugar?" the one who doesn't like sugar?"

But no.

I'd missed a precious chance to let him know that he didn't matter at all to me anymore.

"Oh thanks, Claire," he said, sipping from the mug. "You remembered the way I like it." And he smiled with satisfaction.

I could have happily gone to the kitchen and doused myself in kerosene and set myself alight, so angry was I.

"You're welcome," I said from between gritted teeth.

There was a little silence.

Then James started to speak.

He seemed to have suddenly clicked into Relaxed Mode. The apparent nerves at the front door had evaporated.

I only wish mine had.

"You know, I can't believe that I'm actually here," he mused easily, leaning back in his chair, nursing the traitorous coffee between his cupped hands.

He sounded as if he had no trouble at all in believing it.

"I can't believe you let me in."

Well, actually you're not the only bloody one, I felt like telling him, but didn't.

"Why's that?" I asked with icy politeness.

"Oh," he said, shaking his head with a wry little smile, as though he couldn't quite credit his runaway imagination. "I thought that perhaps your mother and sisters might have done something really nasty when I arrived. You know, poured boiling oil down on top of me. Something like that."

And he sat there and, looking straight into my eyes, he smiled smugly, accepting the ease with which he had been readmitted to the Lion's Den as nothing less than his due,276.